This
summer, starting in early June, I spent one month in Romania (Transylvania
and Moldavia) looking for the villages that had been left out of what has
now extended into my eighth year of research of the Hungarian Csángó
bagpipers.My main target in
Moldavia was to visit some these ‘neglected’ villages in the
Tatros Valley and in the Gajcsána area in search of memories regarding
past pipers.Years earlier, I
had thoroughly explored and already visited the villages in the
surrounding valleys of these communities and found that in those villages
they are unaware of any still-living bagpipers.I thought it improbable that I would find another Hungarian piper,
so my journey was really just to assure myself of this.This trip, however, served me with a surprise as big as any from my
earlier visits*.

I
was already in my third week of traveling in Moldavia when I finally
reached the southern-most Csángó village of Vizánta.I hoped that here I would learn something new, since this village
was at the “end of the world”, and the area is famous for its
Romanian pipers.

At
the edge of the village, I spoke to the first person who crossed my path
and questioned the elderly gentleman about the local instrumental music
traditions.When our
conversation turned to questions about the ‘cimpoi’ the
man’s answer was that he had three for sale!At first, I didn’t understand what he was talking about, what
did he have three of for sale!It turned out that it was András Csobotár, the local
bagpiper/bagpipe maker, who had greeted me at the border of Vizánta!I had not been prepared for this!

As
I quickly found out, he had learned to play the cimpoi from Miklós Atomi,
his 72-year-old brother-in-law, who is still alive but not in good health.The local Mokány shepherds also spoke with great respect of
Atomi’s father who had been an outstanding whistle (furulya) player.No collector/researcher had ever visited them because the village
is far away from the popular folk-tourist targets, and those researchers
who concentrate their efforts on the instrumental music of Moldavia
somehow missed these musicians.

The cimpoi’s had been ordered by a Romanian
shepherd (i.e., not intended for tourists or city musicians).It was my good luck that the shepherd had not shown up for his
instruments and Csobotár was happy to sell them to me.With this purchase, I have been able to compare three instruments
from the same maker; I am able to study them in more detail and can more
accurately determine the method of preparation, etc.

The
pipers from Vizánta play on cimpois with eight finger-holes.It is important that I call attention to the fact that our
knowledge to date has been of two different types of bagpipes used by the
Moldavian Csángó’s.This
discovery has extended our knowledge with a new instrument: the eight
finger-holed cimpoi. The pipers of the quarter million Hungarian Csángó
Moldavians have been using three different forms of bagpipes even at the
beginning of the 21st Century!

These
instruments are:

•The “sip” has the same construction as the Hungarian
“duda”

(Nagypatak,
Klézse, Külső-Rekecsin)

•The “cimpoi” with six finger-holes

(Ploszkucén)

•The “cimpoi” with eight finger-holes

(Vizánta)

Regarding
the eight finger-holed cimpoi, this type of cimpoi is found in the
Romanian villages in the southwestern part of Bákó County, as well Vráncsa
County, and south of there in the valleys of the eastern foothills of the
Carpathians.Based on the
number of finger-holes, the structure of the instruments’ chanters
shows a similarity/relation to the Bulgarian bagpipe (gaida), but the
cimpoi does not have a ‘flea hole’, which is used to give
vibrato to the melody notes or to raise these notes a half tone.The drone pipe is made of two pieces.

Csobotár
makes the instruments himself, the only one among the Csángó Hungarians
who still knows how to make bagpipes.Especially interesting is his method of making the cimpoi, in as
much as he, the instrument maker, goes to the forest to select the perfect
elder branches for the pipes, and later, although seemingly barely
altering them, he assembles them into an instrument.

In
Vizánta you can find one of the most simply made bagpipes in all of
Europe.Csobotár makes
tubes out of the elder branches by cleaning out the soft pulp, then dries
them and pulls off the bark.He
then cuts the tubes to measure, and burns in the holes of the chanter.At this point, the woodwork, for the most part, is complete.He makes the reeds out of local cane.He salts a goatskin then soaks it in whey for two weeks,
which softens the bag and after which it will be ready to tie.Making one instrument is about three to four day’s work,
without counting in the drying time.

The notes of the cimpoi of Vizánta

Chanter

Drone

I
end my writing with the sad news that Mihály Dima, the cimpoi player from
Ploszkucén, passed away on June 9, 2005.Rest in peace.

Fort
Bragg, CA

August
12, 2005

* Katalin Juhász wrote about my 1998 and 1999 travels in the Hungarian
“folkMAGazine” (Volumes 1999/4, 2000/1).In 2001 Gergely Agócs edited the book entitled “A
duda, a furulya és a kanásztülök” (The Bagpipe, The
Whistle and the Shepherd’s Horn) which included my writings about
the bagpipers of Moldavia, “Fújják
és táncolnak utána” (“They blow it and dance to it”).